Flight Safety

A helicopter giving rides to fairgoers at the Bloomsburg Fair in Pennsylvania crashed Saturday night, injuring the pilot and two passengers onboard but missing everyone in the parking lot where it came down. The Enstrom 28F was close to the ground, either taking off or landing, when something went wrong and it came down on […]

As airliner seats get smaller and Americans get bigger, the FAA has decided to quantify the effect seat size (on the airplane) has on safety. Deputy Administrator Dan Elwell announced the agency will conduct 12 days of emergency evacuation testing at the end of November to see if stuffing ever growing, uh, masses into progressively […]

The FAA has ordered operators of some of the hard-working fleet of Boeing 737NGs to conduct inspections for cracks in a critical structural assembly that have shown up in some NGs. Boeing found cracks in a plane that had about 35,000 cycles on it, less than half the 90,000 that the “pickle fork” is designed […]

The Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) and the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) unveiled a new program on Thursday designed to provide hands-on opportunities for young people to build and fly radio-control (R/C) aircraft. According to EAA, the Young Eagles Build and Fly “program-in-a-box” will partner local EAA chapters with AMA clubs to create youth-oriented build […]

The NTSB issued a report on Thursday asking the FAA to ensure aircraft regulators and designers consider the effects of multiple cockpit alarms and what can happen when pilots don’t react as expected to emergency situations. According to the NTSB, the report’s seven recommendations stem from its support of the ongoing investigations by Indonesia’s Komite […]

Aviation insurance company Avemco teamed up with the National Association of Flight Instructors (NAFI) last week to discuss some of the common safety issues and pilot personality traits highlighted by the types of insurance claims filed after aircraft accidents. Presented by pilot and head of Avemco’s underwriting operations Mike Adams, the seminar focused on data […]

Now that I could see the airplane, I was pretty sure that It was an Aviat Husky. The down-to-your-shoelaces fog that I’d driven through to the airport was beginning to lose its battle with the sun. When I got out of my car 20 minutes ago, the fog had been the absolute master of the […]

With a looming pilot shortage and few dedicated single-engine trainers on the market, Cirrus has stepped up with a “purpose-built” version of the SR20 called TRAC. It includes features aimed at the training market including a “landing gear simulator.” Cirrus says the TRAC is “thoughtfully crafted with reliability, durability and economy in mind to meet […]

AVweb’s General Aviation Accident Bulletin is taken from the pages of our sister publication, Aviation Safety magazine. All the reports listed here are preliminary and include only initial factual findings about crashes. You can learn more about the final probable cause on the NTSB’s website at www.ntsb.gov. Final reports appear about a year after the […]

Coming soon, a “humble” FAA? New Administrator Steve Dickson used a word not often associated with the agency when talking to air traffic controllers about the agency’s role in the historic grounding of the Boeing 737 MAX and the two catastrophic crashes that precipitated it. “We can always improve, we can always get better,” Dickson […]